"David Gerrold - Starsiders 1 - Jumping of the Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

listen to my music without anybody interrupting. But when I try to listen at home, all of Mom's sentences
begin with, "Charles, if you're not doing anything right nowтАФ"And when I tell her I am doing something,
she says, "No, you're not. You're just listening to your music." Hello? Is anybody home?
We live in Bunker City, which is supposed to be part of El Paso, but it's really just an old tube-city
built in a hurry to house refugees from the west, and then prettied up a lot when they didn't go home
afterward. So now it's another suburb, sort of.
What it is, is a place where a bunch of tube-houses have been buried up to their armpits in sand.
When the wind blows, the sky disappears and we get to spend a week at a time staring at the curved walls
of our pipe-rooms. Sometimes the lights flicker and go yellow. Twice we've had outages and had to sit in
the dark waiting for the wind farms to come back online. I don't know why a sandstorm should put a wind
farm out of commission, except it does. Anyway, sitting alone in the dark with no one to talk to except
Weird and Stinky is not my idea of a good time. It doesn't take too long before we're all really hating each
other. Weird says that during the sandstorms is when most murders happen. I can understand that.
Anyway, Dad shows up every June and the first couple days are always spent driving somewhere.
Usually Colorado or Arizona, although once we went to Mexico for two days. That was like a downtown
tube-city with hot sauce. I got to practice my Spanish in a restaurant. I understood two words of the
waiter's reply.
Dad works so hard trying to be a pal that it's embarrassing. He tells us how much he loves us, how
much he misses us, how he wishes we could spend more time together, and we all do the obligatory
performances of, "we love you too, Daddy," but it's like acting for a stranger. Who is this guy anyway?
Weird just grunts and Stinky just whines and it's up to me to carry on the conversation. And that's about
as much fun as kissing your brother. Either one.
Eventually, after two or three days of Dad's earnest attempts to be Dad, Stinky usually does
something ghastly, like peeing in the back seat or throwing up into the cooler, and Dad loses his temper,
and then everything is back to normal. Nobody talks. Dad turns up the stereo and we listen to Beethoven
or Wagner or Tchaikovsky and that's actually not so bad. It's better than trying to talk to each other.
Sometimes Dad tells us stories about the music, but not very often.
Dad works for a music consortium, so he knows a lot of gossip about composers and what they were
thinking of when they wrote this piece or that. Sometimes he really lights up when he talks about his
music and I remember we used to have fun times together when he tried to teach me about conductingтАФ
but something happened, I don't know what, and it was like part of the fire went out. Now Dad still listens
to music, but he doesn't talk about it so much anymore.
So there we were, in Dad's rented minivan heading west toward someplace in Arizona and suddenly
he says, "I've got an idea. Let's go to the moon. What do you think, Chigger?" What was I supposed to
say? I said what I felt. So of course, Dad got angry at me. And then Weird and Stinky did too.
But if he didn't want to hear it, then why did he ask?
And why didn't he ask when it was important? It was my family too. Nobody asked me if I wanted it
split up. They just did it.

A HOLE IN THE GROUND
I don't know if the Barringer meteor crater is at the end of the world, but I'm pretty sure you can see it
from there. If there's a lonelier, uglier, more empty place in the world, I'm sure I don't want to go there.
You drive for hours across the desert, and then there's a sign with an arrow, so you turn off and
follow a two-lane road across some more desert, but the road still doesn't look like it's going anywhere.
The ground goes up a little, but there's nothing to see except a dinky little building. You go through the
building because you have to pay admission, and then you walk out the back, and up a path. Then you go
up some stairs and suddenly there you areтАФstanding on the edge and staring down into the biggest hole in
the world and saying a lot of stupid things that don't come anywhere near to expressing how deep and
scary it really is.
Dad said, "Geezis."